What Is the Only Lesson to Be Learned?

“But it’s fascinating when you really look at that ‘seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world.’ T-21.In.1:7 We talk about the world. We could talk about the projected linear time-space cosmos; we could talk about the ego, you know. ‘There is no world!’ (W-132.6:2) is what Jesus tells us. And in the Course, in the Workbook, with an exclamation point after that actually, is pretty emphatic. But also, we can say there is no ego. So ego and world in this sense are being used in a synonymous way. And that the ego is a death wish; you can’t really change a death wish. You can just see that it’s impossible. That’s what the Holy Spirit, the light of the Atonement shows: the impossibility of the error.

And when you really take it in, you start to realize that all of time is just repeating that belief in the original error. So it’s just an error that seems to be repeated over and over and over. And that’s what makes time. It makes the illusion of time and makes the illusion of change. Time is associated with change. And that’s why there’s so many ways of measuring, so many increments of time, from seconds to minutes, to hours, to days, to weeks, to years, to decades, to centuries, and on and on, millennium, and so on and so forth. Time is changing; that’s what the physicists have told us, you know, that the cosmos is expanding. It seems to involve a movement towards destruction and chaos, which is what they call ‘entropy.’ But it’s always in flux. Everything is changing, shifting. And all of that, if you had to put a mask over eternity, that’s quite a mask, a mask of constant change and flux, covering over the changeless, that which is eternal, that which has no beginning and no end. And so the main distinction, you could say, the one distinction that is required to wake up from this dream, is just to see the impossibility of change.”